Dylan Greene dot com

Is Google using me to take over the world? Check this out. (Yes, he misspelled my last name (Greene with an e at the end), but that's why I also own DylanGreen.com). Google thinks 7 different sites that I either run or are about my pages are somehow related to his site. You can use this feature by clicking on the "Similar pages" link when you are doing searches. Here's the related sites for www.DylanGreene.com which is different than DylanGreene.com and www.Dylan95.com even though they all point to the same page.

I have my fears about Google, which wants to remain a private company probably just so that their financial information remains non-disclosed. I bet they are racking money in. For example check out Google's lunch menu, which is cooked up by Greatful Dead's former exclusive chef. My company has some very nice free catered lunches from local restaurants every day, but not the stuff normally exclusive to a 5 start restaurant that Google is feeding it's workers. Something more to Google that we don't know? I'm not the only one suspicious.

When good marshmallows go bad... Or maybe it was the drunk people who couldn't handle their marshmallows. Well make up your own mind... check out the photos yourself.

Most Extreme Elimination Challenge. The funniest show you've never heard of. My dad let me voice mail to watch it without describing what I was to see. I won't be so mean to you: Take Japanese game show from the 80's which has massive overly-elaborate physical stunts and challenges that would make any safety officer cry (already funny by itself) and replace the dialog NOT with a direct translation, but something original and too funny to explain. Picture the crew from Mystery Science Theater 3000 giving the job to re-dub American Gladiators, only the contestants are your everyday Japanese citizens (not beefed up), and they suspend those challenges over dirty lakes, mud, and more.

Okay, the bad news: It's on TNN, which I consider as much a waste of network bandwidth as I do any religious channel or infomercial channel. Their whole network is based off of Star Trek reruns and bad wrestling. Even sadder, this show is not mentioned on the network's web site besides in their schedule. Maybe a more worthy network is trying to pick up the show.

Most Extreme Elimination Challenge is on Saturdays at 9pm and Sundays at 8pm, they show two 30 minute episodes back to back. My girlfriend and I both find it hilarious, and we've added it to our required comedy watching along with The Daily Show, Simpsons, and once I find the DVD set (sold out everywhere I went the day it came out), Family Guy.

Oh, and here's some photos from Desiree's camera that I'm sharing for her.

Yet another vacuuming robot has come to light. This one is the Roboking from LG Electronics.

Unlike the Roomba, the Roboking can automatically figure out the best way to clean a room, and once it's finished, return to its charging station.

Have you seen Roomba Wars 1 yet? Perhaps I should have a sequel: Roomba Wars 2: Attack of the Clones.

Spring is here finally, so here's some new photos. (Whatever, just be happy I put some new photos up.) The Great Falls photos include some artistic black and white shots that should look nice if were to print them out on a laser printer and frame.

I want to by a house. I'm sick of throwing my money away into the rent machine. Can you recommend a good realtor for the Fairfax/Arlington county area?

If you work for webMethods, then you'll appreciate these photos. Otherwise, it might just look like a bunch of random people having a little too much fun.

Take three three guys, three girls, Pablo Francisco, the DC Improv, and the Lucky Bar, mix well, and this is what you get.

In the theme of Alan Cooper's Goal-Directed Design methodology, I would like to propose my own design methodology. While I think goal-directed design (design based on what the user's goal is, not the task to get to that goal) is a great methodology, and it works most of the time, there are those times that it doesn't work, or even backfires producing complicated designs when all the user wanted is something obvious. This article will show shortfalls of Goal-Directed design and how OBVIOUS Design fixes the problems.

My methodology is simply called OBVIOUS Design. The idea is that if something isn't obvious to the user, then fix it so it is.

OBVIOUS Design is best explained with an example. You are in Word, and you accidentally move the toolbar somewhere else. This can happen by accidentally dragging any non-button area of the toolbar, which can happen when you think you are clicking on a toolbar icon but missed. Your toolbar is now above the menu bar and you have no idea how it got there, why, or how to fix it.

To anybody that is a Word user, fixing something like this must be obvious. There must be a way to put the toolbar back where it usually is. (It's obvious to me that I can drag the bar back in place, but I'm not the target audience. Discovering our target audience by using a personas is explained in the last paragraph of this write up.)

Goal-directed design would ask "What is the user's goal?" In this case, the user does not know the goal. The user just knows that his or her screen looks different than it used to, and restarting Word doesn't fix the problem.

OBVIOUS Design is based on what the user would expect. In this case, the user expected the toolbar to return to it's normal place by restarting Word. Word should know where the toolbar has been the other 99% of the time and present the user with an obvious option to return the toolbar back.

Word would do this by monitoring the user's behavior: Word must know if the toolbar drag was by accident or on purpose. If you were watching this user, you would know right away that the user is having a problem. You would see the user try different things to get the toolbar back. If you can see this behavior, then so can Word.

Note that Microsoft tried something like this with the Paper Clip. Part of the reason users despise the Paper Clip is because it guessed wrong too often, therefor the "crying wolf syndrome" meant that users didn't listen to it when it guessed right. The Paper Clip could have been a best friend that always helps you in times of need, out but instead it became the neighbor that wouldn't shut up about your grass clippings. OBVIOUS Design does not say that the the Paper Clip is the answer - OBVIOUS Design says that monitoring user behavior and offering the user choices based on predictions for future behavior can be extremely helpful. (If you always put mail from John into your Friends folder, then Outlook could ask you if it should make a rule to always move mail from that person there. But this suggestion must not be in the user's face.)

The next question is a big one: Should clicking Undo put the toolbar back? Again, Goal-Directed design does not tell us if the user's goal is to undo the last text change in his or her document, or "undo" the change to the user interface (ie: put the toolbar back). OBVIOUS Design tells us to make the Undo action obvious. So if it's going to put the toolbar back, the Undo button should state so. If this is the case, since the user might have done some work after moving the toolbar, Undo should not be a stack where the most recently done thing MUST be undone before the thing before it can be - instead it should be a list of things that recently happened - including changing the user interface or even saving a file. Does this make Undo too complicated? Maybe, but Undo can be fixed using OBVIOUS Design as well.

The most important part of OBVIOUS Design is to know what would be obvious to the user. For this, we use another invention/discovery from Alan Cooper, this one is called Personas. A persona is a fake user based on collected information from interviews with real users (not co-workers, and if you can't find real or potentially new users then that is a hint that there might not be anybody who wants what you are creating). The Persona has a name, a photo, a list of qualifications and traits, behaviors, likes and dislikes, etc. Everything but the name and face is data driven from the interviews. If done correctly, your persona is a perfect average of your users. Never ask yourself if something is obvious, always refer to the Persona. More about creating good personas, from Kim Goodwin, who trained me at the Interaction Design Practicum last November, and some good books on the subject, also from Cooper.

OBVIOUS Design can require more work on the design and development of a product, but the end result means more happy users and less confused users, which should lead to more sales and more money for development.

OBVIOUS Design is perfect for applications like Word where the user-base ranges from highly skilled to beginner users even when the two extremes don't find the same thing to be obvious (solved because Word would have more than one persona). OBVIOUS Design removes the guesswork and tedious learning curve (solved because all features and options are obvious to find and use). A product designed with OBVIOUS Design means that if a user wants to do something, figuring out how to do it is always OBVIOUS.

Please leave a comment if you think I should explore this idea more, if you see problems with it, or have ideas on how to make it even better. Thanks!

Wow, this report about ENTP is exactly about me. It also fits most of my friends and my girlfriend too. What are you?

Famous ENTPs:

Thanks to Craig for pointing this whole mess out to me. I'm sure it's nothing new to most people, but nice for me to see.

Here's some new photos courtesy of Jennifer. Her vacation photos are really something. Hopefully she'll put up descriptions soon.